“This isn’t your duchy,” Father replied. He sounded almost contemplative. “And the more you try to take it, the more I think it never should be.”
The whole hall was silent for a breath, waiting for Lyosha’s lightning to finally ground.
“The brideshow’s off,” Lyosha called, his voice bouncing off the hard ice walls.
Noise rippled across the hall. Father grabbed for Lyosha’s arm, but Lyosha had spun on his heel and was already striding through the candidates, who scattered and regrouped like a herd of animals.
Father clapped his hands. In response, the guards around the hall slammed their halberds against the ground with a crack. In the silence that followed, he said in an impossibly calm voice, “The brideshow will resume tomorrow. Please enjoy yourselves.”
By the time he was finished, most of the foreign delegates had begun to shout.
“Excellent,” Velosha murmured beside me, and I shuddered. If Lyosha lost the title of heir-elect, she’d look to win it through a process of elimination—specifically, by eliminating her sibling rivals. Half the court ministers disappeared; the rest decided to settle the matter by arguing at the top of their lungs.
A hand gripped my elbow and yanked me sideways. Aino. She was supposed to stand at the edge of the hall as a lesser lady, but she’d squeezed her way over to me. “Come on,” she said, pulling me toward a side door. She elbowed past the minister of the people, and I tripped over the minister of trade’s robe. He stumbled past me, steadying himself by putting a hand on top of my head for balance. Had it been a normal night, I would have confronted him for his rudeness.
Aino dragged me past anxious servants to the corridor, barely letting me get my feet under me. The flickering lamps set into the walls caught the red in her auburn hair, and her knuckles were white around my arm. We hurried past officials and servants who rushed the other way, alarmed, no doubt, by the noise. “Slow down,” I protested, tripping over the heavy hem of my coat. Aino didn’t answer. “Aino!” She wrenched me around a corner, nearly dislocating my shoulder. The iron grips on the bottoms of my shoes dug into the ice.
She didn’t slow down until we reached the royal wing and passed beyond the guards there. We scurried down corridors carved with the scenes of my family—grand dukes battling with enemies, treating with the duchy Below, choosing brides from their own brideshows. Winter roses twined above us, their ice petals stretching into a two-thirds bloom.
Aino dug out a key and unlocked my door with trembling fingers. Then she shoved me inside.
The fire was out. The ice walls of my rooms glowed blue-white in moonlight that streamed through thin windowpanes. Aino dumped firewood into the metal basin that served as the fireplace, then started the fire with dry moss and a flint.
The fire basin sat on a thick stone shelf to protect the ice floor beneath, and white and blue tiles lined its chimney. A bearskin rug lay in front of the fire, and I sat in the oak chair there, shifting a blanket to one side. I slid my feet out of my wooden shoes and dug my socks into the rug. A tightness began to uncoil in me. No siblings to murder me, no Father or Mother to examine me, balancing my usefulness and irrelevance against my potential as a threat. I pulled diamond-studded pins from hair that had Mother’s paleness but not its curl.
My rooms always meant safety to me, but not to Aino. She locked the door, slid the bolt, and heaved a chair from next to the door until it blocked the handle. Then she went to lock the door to the servants’ corridor.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Making sure no one separates your head from your neck in whatever happens tonight.” Aino’s braid had come undone, and she pinned it back up with thin-lipped determination. “This is a coup, and Lyosha and your father are in the middle of it. You don’t have to be. How packed are you?”
“Fairly packed.” My trunk sat in a corner of the room, stuffed with all the things I thought I’d need at the university—clothes, books, sketches of the biology of Above, a few plates with detail on flora from Below sent up as a sample and gift to Farhod. I was still working on copying his dissection report, a recent—and generous—gift from the duchy Below to expand our academic knowledge.
“Good. We’ll set out tonight, and we won’t come back until one of them is grand duke and one of them is dead.”
No one could boss me around like Aino could. She was more of a mother to me than Mother. She was shorter and slimmer than our family, with wide blue eyes that always looked alarmed and a nose made for poking into my business. She knew the intrigues of Lyosha and my parents before I did, and she made sure I was always well dressed for events of the court, well versed in what to say, and well protected from the worst of my family’s wrath. She tasted my coffee every morning and ran her fingers along the seams of my new clothes to check for razors my siblings might have slipped in. Worrying for my safety lined her mouth and forehead and streaked her hair with gray before its time. In recent weeks, she’d looked more and more worn out as she updated me on which minister backed which family member and how many siblings were trying to get involved in the imminent coup.
I didn’t pay much attention. I cared less for Lyosha’s political ambitions than I did for a vial of wolf urine. At least I could learn something interesting from wolf urine. And as long as my chief interests were the flora and fauna of Above and Below, I doubted any ministers or ambitious family members cared about me. All the same: “I can’t leave yet.” Even if I had no interest in the duchy, I had a duty. Our family was Kylma Above, and we had responsibilities to uphold. Father had stipulated that I could go south when the brideshow was over, not before. If I violated his order, he might find some way to prevent me from going at all.
I went over to my desk, skipping across the floor in my wool socks. “What are you doing?” Aino asked.
“I might as well get some work done.” I pulled a stack of papers from the middle drawer of the desk. I was copying and annotating Farhod’s technical drawings of a dissected citizen Below, and I had to finish the project before I went south. They’d be part of my university portfolio and application. Farhod had warned me that gaining admittance was hard, even for the daughter of a grand duke—but detailed dissection notes of a creature never seen before was sure to catch the attention of scholars and professors.
“You ought to rest.” Aino checked the door, then paced back to the fire, dispersing the logs with a poker. “We shouldn’t have lit this. What if someone realizes you’re here?”
I rolled my eyes as I lit the little candle under my frozen inkwell. Aino was back to her favorite hobby: fretting. “No one can see me, and no one’s going to care. Fetch my robe, won’t you?”
She stomped off, muttering about ungrateful brats and coups and heads. I was restless, too, and opened the window next to my desk, leaning out to let the cold air sting my cheeks.
The palace was quieter than usual. Maybe we really were on the cusp of a coup. Or maybe the brideshow was canceled, and nobody wanted to celebrate. From here, I could just see the bridal tower, and I wondered if the candidates had retreated to it. The girl in the riding suit didn’t seem like the type to retreat from anything.
A lone figure hurried across a decorative wall, and four stories beneath me lay the thick ice sheet that separated Above and Below. I wanted to crack that ice so badly that it split my heart to think about it. Beneath that ice swam undulating bodies with serpentine legs, vague shapes I could nearly recognize when I walked on the lake’s frozen surface. The duchy Below was our closest ally and our dearest friend. It was the only political matter I had any interest in. It was the greatest thing Father had denied me—and denied me, and denied me.